Over the years, various office automation equipment has been developed for providing offices with automatic systems for dictation, transcription, word processing, financial analysis, and other office functions which could be automated. This office automation equipment generally applied to all types of offices including sales, financial, legal, insurance, research, medical and various service or other business offices. Each type of office or general field of the office, however, often has their own constraints and problems for office automation equipment. The medical field, for example, has attempted to automate the diagnosis of a patient's illness based upon a patient's symptoms and then often recommended a corresponding patient treatment. Examples of such systems can be seen in U.S. Pat. No, 4,733,354 by Potter et al. titled "Method And Apparatus For Automated Medical Diagnosis Using Decision Tree Analysis," U.S. Pat. No. 4,839,822 by Dormond et al. titled "Computer System And Method For Suggesting Treatments For Physical Trauma," U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,872,122 and 5,005,143 by Atlschuler et al. and each titled "Interactive Statistical System And Method For Predicting Expert Decisions," and U.S. Pat. No. 5,692,220 by Diamond et al. "Decision Support System And Method For Diagnosis Consultation In Laboratory Hematopathology." Although such systems can have a role in medical office and hospital automation, such systems are often limited to a research location, e.g., using a knowledge base which correlates patient symptoms to diagnosis of an illness and/or recommendations of a treatment, for only selective uses. In other words, the physician or other medical personnel remain the primary patient contact and interface, and diagnosis and treatment decisions usually remain substantially in the hands of the physician.
Because the physician or other medical personnel, e.g., nurses, nurse assistants, technicians, remain the primary patient contact and primary decision maker, the physician or other medical personnel are also primarily responsible for creating the medical record or history of a patient such as the creating or forming of a progress note or narrative description during a patient encounter. These medical records often become more and more critical to an office, hospital, or other organization, e.g., the medical records representing a complete record of a patient's health care administered by a physician, other medical personnel, or the facility in general. Accordingly, attempts have been made over the years to automate the medical history taking process. Examples of such attempts can be seen in U.S. Pat. No. 4,130,881 by Haessler et al. titled "System And Technique For Automated Medical History Taking," U.S. Pat. No. 5,146,439 by Jachmann et al. titled "Records Management System Having Dictation/Transcription Capability," U.S. Pat. No. 5,265,075 by Bergeron et al. titled "Voice Processing System With Editable Voice Files," and U.S. Pat. No. 5,327,341 by Whalen titled "Computerized File Maintenance System For Managing Medical Records Including Narrative Reports."
Some of these automated medical record forming systems, for example, require that a user enter information about a patient into selected fields so that the medical record is formed by question and answer prompts or data entry into what is essentially a form, e.g., based upon a limited set of predetermined answers to a prompted question. Others of these systems merely allow transcribed files to be accessed again or allow portions of files which are similar to not need repetition. Such systems, however, provide little utility for a physician directly and require that the physician adapt to some style, format, language usage, or other constraints of the automated system and provide little or no freedom for the physician's own style. Additionally, such systems often require additional personnel to transcribe, enter and manage the forms and require personnel training and learning of the particular format used by the system. Others of these automated medical record forming and management systems often record and transcribe dictation for entry into a computer or database which then can create, update, and manage medical records. Some of these systems allow a physician to dictate but require a transcriber to extract pertinent sections from the dictated report for entry into the computer in predefined categories. Accordingly, these systems also require additional personnel to transcribe dictation, enter and manage the forms, and to be trained and learn the particular format used by the system.